The short Argentinian film Venga a bailar el rock (1957) was Lalo Schifrin’s first film scoring assignment, and as he recalled in our interview late last fall, he was seen as the right man at the right time to bring a new sound to the country’s film industry after the Peron regime was defeated.

Life under Peron, and the many brilliant minds he met and collaborated with during his 50+ year career, is partly what Mission Impossible: My Life in Music, Schifrin’s autobiography (and first book) is all about. Published by Scarecrow Press in 2008, it's actually the second time Schifrin has appeared at length in book form to elaborate on his years in jazz, film, and classical.

To begin a bit of a retrospective of Schifrin’s work, there’s our latest interview with the composer. I’ve also uploaded a film review of his first European feature film, René Clément’s Les Felins / aka Joy House (1964), which was reissued on DVD in 2008 by Koch Lorber.

The soundtrack has also appeared on CD, first from Universal France as part of their massive and ongoing series of rare and long-neglected film scores (many of them jazz) from French films, and then reissued on Schifrin’s own label, Aleph, in 2005. That soundtrack review has also been uploaded, with a particular emphasis on how this score clearly showed Schifrin was no novice flirting with movie music.

Coming soon are reviews of Schifrin’s book, as well as the French language Q&A, Lalo Schifrin: Entretiens avec Georges Michel. (Yes, kids, this is why it was worth studying French for 14 years. Thank heavens it hasn’t dissolved over the past 22 years!)

Throughout January and February, I’ll have film reviews of movies scored by Schifrin, and album reviews, including The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Coming next: Anchor Bay’s Halloween: 25 Years of Terror (2006) documentary, and Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film (2006)